Category Archives: Right wing

German interior minister says Muslim parents are to blame if their children turn to violent extremism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hans-Peter Friedrich2German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich urged the country’s Muslim community on Friday to do more to prevent the spread of radicalization among its youth.

He told Muslim leaders at a meeting in Berlin that families must act early to prevent young boys from turning into jihadists.

“Neither the security authorities nor ordinary Muslim citizens can do much to help,” when youths radicalize, he said. “It is up to the parents and the rest of the family to be observant about what their children are up to and how they are changing.”

Friedrich, a member of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), had summoned the meeting to discuss the risks of homegrown terrorism.

Germany’s political opposition denounced the meeting, saying the government ran the risk of stigmatizing all Muslims. “If we want to isolate extremists who are prone to violence, we must support moderate Muslims and make them feel welcome in Germany,” said the center-left Social Democrats parliamentary leader Thomas Oppermann.

The head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, attended the meeting, but said he thought it had the wrong focus. “We have over 2,500 mosques and there aren’t even a dozen fringe groups,” he said. “We have to make it clear they are a small and dwindling group and that by talking about them and hyping them, we just strengthen them. That should not be the aim of a conference like this.”

Mazyek said the government needed to work harder on making Muslims feel at home in Germany and to campaign against Islamophobia. He said lack of integration into society was the main cause for radicalization of Muslim youths. Mazyek added that Muslim groups had already been cooperative in the government’s bid to prevent terrorism. He said that the effort should not be a “one-way street.”

Deutsche Welle, 25 June 2011

Netanyahu’s son abused Muslims on Facebook

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Israeli Prime Minister’s 19-year-old son posted disparaging comments about Arabs and Muslims on his Facebook page, an Israeli paper reported yesterday.

Earlier this year, Yair Netanyahu posted that Muslims “celebrate hate and death,” the Haaretz daily said. After Palestinian assailants entered a West Bank settlement and stabbed five members of an Israeli family to death, he wrote that “terror has a religion and it is Islam”.

Yair Netanyahu, the eldest of Benjamin Netanyahu’s two sons, is currently a soldier in the Israeli military’s media liaison unit. A lawyer for the Netanyahu family, David Shimron, said the comments were those of a “teenager” and were “taken out of context in an attempt to defame the Prime Minister and his family”.

The Prime Minister’s son also ran a Facebook group that called for a boycott of Arab businesses, and used obscenities to describe Arabs.Haaretz said the comments were removed within hours of the paper’s request for a response from the Prime Minister’s representatives.

Independent, 25 June 2011

Sayeeda Warsi on Melanie Phillips

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Baroness_WarsiSayeeda Warsi rolls back in her chair and bursts out laughing. “I don’t read her, actually. I call her Mad Mel,” Lady Warsi says of Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who has denounced her as “stupid”.

Warsi, a proud Yorkshirewoman, rarely pulls her punches. As the first Muslim to sit as a full member of the British cabinet, she fell foul of Phillips in January after she declared in the Sternberg lecture that Islamophobia had “crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability”.

Phillips’ barbed response was to describe Warsi, the Tory co-chair, on her Spectator blog as “at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process”.

Guardian, 24 June 2011

New CAIR, UC Berkeley report documents growing Islamophobia in U.S.

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Same Hate New TargetThe Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender today released a report based on available data and interviews with experts that documents growing Islamophobia in the United States and offers recommendations about how to challenge the troubling phenomenon.

The groundbreaking report – titled “Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States 2009-2010” – offers a definition of Islamophobia as a “close-minded prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims” and an overview of its growing negative impact in the United States. After defining the term, the report states: “It is not appropriate to label all, or even the majority of those, who question Islam and Muslims as Islamophobes.”

Special sections in the report focus on the manufactured controversy over the Park 51 Islamic community center in Manhattan, the 2010 Oklahoma ballot initiative targeting Islamic principles (Sharia) and Islamophobia in the 2010 elections.

“This report shows that Americans who embrace pluralism must act together to prevent Islamophobia from being accepted in mainstream society,” said CAIR National Legislative Director Corey Saylor, one of the report’s co-authors. “Islamophobia is the new face of an old hate that has targeted minorities throughout our nation’s history.”

CAIR press release, 23 June 2011

Download the report here.

More information on the Center for Race and Gender’s Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project here.

Update:  Or, for an alternative view, see Robert Spencer, “Hamas-linked CAIR teams up with UC Berkeley prof who called for ‘intifada’ in U.S. for defamatory ‘Islamophobia’ report”, Jihad Watch, 23 June 2011

That’s the same Robert Spencer who is described in the report as promoting “an intellectualized Islamophobia through ‘selectively ignoring’ Islamic texts and principles that do not fit his view of Islam as the enemy”.

The report also notes: “In 2006, Spencer participated in a conference honoring anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who sought to legalize government discrimination in the Netherlands. Spencer proudly highlights his participation in this conference among his ‘Notable Speaking Engagements’. Fortuyn’s anti-Muslim views and the resulting backlash against Muslims living in the Netherlands are noted in the Department of State’s International Religious Freedom Reports for 2002 and 2005.”

‘Muslim intimidation’ has struck fear in the ‘British Christian majority’, claims Benny Morris

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Benny MorrisIsraeli historian Benny Morris has written an account of last week’s visit to the London School of Economics where he addressed a meeting on the subject of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

The visit understandably provoked some controversy, given Morris’s support for ethnic cleansing and his bigoted comments about Muslims, and he complains that he was harangued by demonstrators on his way to the lecture theatre. (“Several spoke in broken, obviously newly acquired, English.”)

And what conclusion does Morris draw from this experience of political opponents exercising their legitimate right to protest against him? He writes: “Uncurbed, Muslim intimidation in the public domain of people they see as disagreeing with them is palpable and palpably affecting the British Christian majority among whom they live, indeed, cowing them into silence. One senses real fear….”

Of course, such comments are hardly unexpected, coming from a man who is on record as stating that “the phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat”.

However, imagine the outrage that would result if a Palestinian speaker at the LSE had been harangued by Zionist students and responded by writing: “Uncurbed, Jewish intimidation in the public domain of people they see as disagreeing with them is palpable and palpably affecting the British Christian majority among whom they live, indeed, cowing them into silence. One senses real fear….”

One thing is certain, that individual would never again be invited to speak at the LSE.

The anti-Muslim inner circle

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The apparent recent surge in popular anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States has been driven by a surprisingly small and, for the most part, closely knit cadre of activists. Their influence extends far beyond their limited numbers, in part because of an amenable legion of right-wing media personalities – and lately, politicians like U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who held controversial hearings into the radicalization of American Muslims this March – who are eager to promote them as impartial experts or grassroots leaders. Yet a close look at their rhetoric reveals how doggedly this group works to provoke and guide populist anger over what is seen as the threat posed by the 0.6% of Americans who are Muslim – an agenda that goes beyond reasonable concern about terrorism into the realm of demonization.

The summer issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report profiles ten of the leading US Islamophobes.

Via LoonWatch

Right-wing blogger charged with harassing Muslim women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A St. Paul blogger faces misdemeanor charges after he allegedly harassed two Muslim women last week in downtown Minneapolis. Minneapolis police say John Hugh Gilmore, 52, who writes a blog called Minnesota Conservatives, caused a scene Thursday night on Nicollet Mall.

Sgt. Bill Palmer, a police spokesman, said Gilmore appeared to be drunk when he confronted the two women wearing the Muslim headscarf known as the hijab. “Mr. Gilmore made some comments that he didn’t believe the women should be in the United States, and that he thought that they were ruining America,” Palmer said.

Police say several onlookers intervened, and Gilmore allegedly threatened to assault one of the men.

The Muslim women had been attending the liberal NetRoots Nation convention, which was taking place at the same time as the conservative RightOnline conference.

Minnesota Public Radio, 20 June 2011

See also Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2o June 2011